Advertisement
X

Catherine 바카라Kitty바카라 Texeira, The Most Photographed Person Of McCluskieganj

Catherine 바카라Kitty바카라 Texeira remains the most photographed person appearing on the covers of books and in photographs in articles written about the McCluskieganj. She does not know where she could have gone from Gunj as those around her left.

She doesn바카라t know how we know her but she has gotten used to all the strangeness that strangers bring when they come to find her as if she were an artefact that they must see while they are in the McCluskieganj. A woman who is the signifier of a new nation surging ahead and, in the process, alienating those who are outsiders or remnants. Kitty is defiant. Also, she is the antithesis of all that they wanted to claim and preserve. She is almost a feral woman. Frail, agile, and delicate. Her spirit stands in contrast to her exterior. It is that of a survivor.

Kitty memsahib doesn바카라t know where else she could have gone from here. People around her have left. Her mother, Marjorie Roberts, was born in Shillong. She was Anglo-Indian and her father was Welsh. She married what they called a 바카라half-caste바카라, who was of Portuguese descent from Goa called Texeira. 

Kitty was born in 1952. They then moved to the Gunj. The Texeiras had invested all their money in the shares in the company that ran the Gunj and lost their land. Marjorie바카라s husband died and she was left alone with Kitty. They say she wielded a gun and would let nobody come near her daughter. While Marjorie was a typical Anglo-Indian who read English authors like Shakespeare, Kitty could not attend school and had to sell fruits to provide for her mother and herself. Marjorie died in 1988 and Kitty had four children from an Adivasi man who was already married.

Kitty remains the most photographed person appearing on the covers of books and in photographs in articles written about the Gunj. Her children are now grown up. Kitty still lives in the same house. 바카라This is home,바카라 she says. Unlike her mother, who Ian Jack quotes in his story saying that her birthplace was an accident and the world to which she properly belonged lay elsewhere, Kitty entertains no such delusions. She got assimilated as they would say. Kitty doesn바카라t carry what she calls the nostalgia nonsense.

Show comments
KR